Understanding Crime Risk Improves Patient Safety

Patient safety initiatives have grown in importance as healthcare has gotten more complex. Many patient safety issues are completely preventable—in fact, in high-income countries, one in 10 patients is harmed while receiving care, and about half of those patient safety issues are preventable.

Healthcare leaders have developed standards and principles to help organizations understand what risks are present in a health system and how to work toward preventing them. But patient safety doesn’t just encompass care given by healthcare providers within a hospital or health system. It also extends to workplace violence and crimes that can occur in or around hospitals. 

Crime Risk and Joint Commission Standards

 In 2022, the Joint Commission, which develops standards to help hospitals and healthcare systems reach “zero harm,”  released “R3: Requirement, Rationale, Reference.” a report that includes workplace violence standards for healthcare organizations to follow.

The standards include conducting an annual worksite analysis of workplace violence programs so that it can mitigate safety and security risks based on the analysis. According to the report, a worksite analysis includes “a proactive analysis of the worksite, an investigation of the hospital’s workplace violence incidents, and an analysis of how the program’s policies and procedures, training, education, and environmental design reflect best practices and conform to applicable laws and regulations.”

Crime Risk and High-Reliability Organizations

Similarly, high-reliability principles aim to keep patients, staff, and visitors safe at all times. Hospital and healthcare organizations that consider themselves high reliability organizations (HROs) design standardized systems to help them anticipate problems, uncover them early, and respond quickly to prevent an issue from becoming worse. In practice, that means

Accessing up-to-date crime risk data, which includes assault, robbery, larceny, rape, vandalism, and drug offenses, can help drive operational policies and procedures, including determining the types of security they need to ensure patients, staff, and visitors are safe when entering the premises.

Learn more about how healthcare systems use CRIMECAST data to make better security decisions.

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